Emmys: It's "Hacks" vs "Widow's Bay" for Best Comedy

by Cláudio Alves

With 24 individual citations, the last season of HACKS is the year's most nominated comedy.

Just as this post hits the timeline, the TV Academy will be in the middle of its two-day celebration of the so-called Creative Arts Emmys. In other words, the show where they give out every “below the line” category, with the Guest Acting prizes thrown in for good measure. The main ceremony, when the big awards will be announced to a new class of television luminaries – or more of the same, since they sure love to reward the same folks, over and over again – happens on September 14th. It’s a bit of a chaotic time, here at The Film Experience, with the fall festivals on a roll and the film awards season starting to peek over the horizon, while the small screen demands attention of its own. And indeed, we must pay respects to TV and the industry’s highest honors. 

With that in mind, Eric Blume, Nathaniel R, and I decided to have a quick look at the principal races and share our predictions, starting with the Comedies…

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Venice: The Mara Sisters in "Bucking Fastard"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

BUCKING FASTARD © Gateway to Orkney LLC

Back in the 1980s, Werner Herzog met the Chaplin twin sisters for a project, but he is the first to warn against connecting his return to fiction filmmaking after a string of documentary projects too closely to that real story. In his new film Bucking Fastard, Jean and Joan are not twins but sisters who "speak, move, dress, dream and even slip their tongues, as the title proves, in the very same way." The movie is about their quest for true love, one that is neither particularly well planned nor particularly successful, as if the point were simply to find a way not to feel alone. Joan and Jean feel that way - alone together - even though they are always together, even though their understanding of each other is absolute...

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Venice: Danny Boyle Returns with "Ink"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

We live in such a dark age of media, information, conflict and geopolitics that even Rupert Murdoch doesn't seem quite so evil anymore. Or at least his evilness now comes with a why, a when, a where, and all the other Ws clearly attached. It's paradoxical, considering that Ink opens with Murdoch trying to professionally seduce Jack O'Connell's Larry Lamb into becoming the editor of the least serious newspaper on Fleet Street, the heart of the British press back in 1969. (Murdoch is played by Guy Pearce who, after The Brutalist, apparently has become the go-to guy for tycoons who want to own talented people as if they were property.) Lamb tells Murdoch that, of the five Ws, "'Why' is the least important": sometimes there is no why behind what happens, and even when there is, not giving readers one makes it possible to rerun a story forever.

Lamb and Murdoch's power struggle is at the center of a movie that feels like the ideal follow-up to Boyle's little-loved Steve Jobs, another biopic full of shades of morally gray about a powerful mediatic figure...

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Venice: "Wild Horse Nine" is an Instant Oscar Contender

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

WILD HORSE NINE © Searchlight

Two days into Venice, and the new Martin McDonagh movie already seems close to ending the competition for the Golden Lion. There are more than a few dark horses and wild cards waiting over the next ten days of the festival, but the enthusiastic applause at the end of the press screening and John Malkovich's immediate entrance into the Oscar conversation as a leading actor should give everyone a clear idea of just how strong and convincing the film is. Believe the hype: this is a very solid movie about male friendship (no surprise here) that really does not shy away from the political.

McDonagh will not be the last filmmaker arriving here at the Lido with a movie that is quintessentially his creature, "just" another version of his usual work. Nevetheless this one is written and directed with such control and cocksureness, that the result is impressive in its formal perfection...

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Best Actress and the end of the Great Depression: An Alternative Oscar History

by Cláudio Alves

Miriam Hopkins in BECKY SHARP (1935), Janet Gaynor in A STAR IS BORN (1937), and Vivien Leigh in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) were the first 3 Best Actress nominees from full-color movies.

The woes of the Great Depression demanded escapism from Hollywood. Such spectacle came in a myriad of forms, including some technical advancements.

By 1935, the three-strip Technicolor process was ready for features, blessing the silver screen with hues that called themselves natural while shining bright like something out of a dream. New genres came into being, too, sometimes as an echo of the dark times – think gangster pictures and their basis in social realism turned pulp or the rise of horror at Universal – and sometimes as an antidote. The screwball comedy was a child of the Great Depression, alright, with some of its greatest hits holding a blissfully distorted mirror to off-screen miseries, distracting from them and offering some magical impossibility as succor for the soul. In other areas, movies kept getting bigger, upping the ante in ways that recalled the great epics of silent cinema, those endeavors that moved armies and mountains for the camera’s gaze and the audience’s pleasure.

Obviously, this all reverberated through the Oscars, including and especially the Best Actress race. But will my personal ballots reflect it in the same fashion? Well…

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